354 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



May 1. 



L. H. IV., Mo. — A nucleus hive may be 

 placed in an exhibition window in a store, 

 without any entrance to the outside. The 

 bees may thus be confined for four or five 

 days or possibly a week ; but it is better at the 

 end of that length of time to give them a 

 flight of a day or two, or, better still, change 

 the bees entirely. If the entrance can be ar- 

 ranged so as not to interfere with passers-by 

 on the street we would advise giving the bees 

 communication to the outside. They could be 

 thus kept day after day without any change. 



T. R., Hawaii. — From the brief description 

 you have given in your letter of the affected 

 bees, we should say they have what is called 

 bee-paralysis. We know of no cure for it ; 

 and if it once gets started in a warm country 

 it is liable to be very destructive. We would 

 advise you to remove all diseased colonies to 

 a location where the bees can not get near any 

 others. Destroy the queens of the diseased 

 stocks, and introduce in their stead queens 

 from healthy stocks. This may be the means 

 of bringing about a cure. If this does not 

 give relief you had better destroy the bees and 

 combs, and boil the hives for an hour at least, 

 to disinfect them. 



M. IV. M., III. — If you have a surplus of 

 extracting combs or brood-combs filled with 

 honey, and capped over, you will find these 

 your best stock in trade. They are very use- 

 ful in giving to colonies short of stores in the 

 fall, in the spring, or even in mid-winter. Of 

 course, if you have too many of them, and de- 

 sire empty brood-combs to give to the bees, 

 then we see no other way than for you to buy 

 an extractor with which you may empty out 

 the surplus combs. In an apiary of 100 colo- 

 nies we consider 100 extra combs filled and 

 capped over as the very best kind of capital. 

 They save a lot of feeding, and are so handy 

 that they can be used any time without dis- 

 commoding the colony. 



E. P., Ind.- — During winter there is apt to 

 be a good deal of dampness in the hives. It is 

 caused by the fact that the inside temperature 

 of the hives is much warmer than the outside; 

 and as warm air holds in suspen'-ion a large 

 amount of moisture, when it strikes the cold 

 sides of the hives it condenses and runs down 

 just as water condenses and runs down the 

 sides of a pitcher containing ice water on a 

 hot summer day. This condensation amounts 

 to considerable — sometimes so much that the 

 water will run out of the entrance. Ordinari- 

 ly it does no harm unless this condensed 

 moisture gets into the packing materials or 

 cushions, causing them to be damp and soggy. 

 All such should be removed and dried out the 

 first bright day of sunshine. 



J. R. T., loiva. — For Italianizing the most 

 economically by starting with one good tested 

 queen, we would refer you to the plan men- 

 tioned on p. 32 of our catalog. You can not 



very well raise pure Italians with common 

 blacks or hybrids in the same yard unless you 

 use perforated metal entrance-guards or Alley 

 traps to kill off the drones of the black and 

 hybrid colonies. For particulars regarding 

 entrance-guards, etc., see p. 21 of our catalog, 

 and also p. 32. If your neighbors have black 

 or hybrid bees within a quarter or half a mile 

 you will need to put entrance-guards over their 

 colonies; for the bees will cross, even if the 

 separate hives are half a mile apart, and, to a 

 limited extent, even when a mile apart. For 

 full particulars see " Drones," also " Oueen- 

 rearing," in our A B C book. There must be 

 some mistake about two bees eating 2 lbs. of 

 honey over winter. That is utterly out of the 

 question. No doubt the man who reports it is 

 honest, and believes it to be true, but he is 

 surely mistaken. There are something like 

 4500 bees to the pound, and 3 lbs. to the colo- 

 ny. Such a colony will consume over winter, 

 during the time named by your friend, not 

 more than 10 lbs. of honjey. According to 

 this, 1 lb. of honey would support 1350 bees, 

 so you can see that the statement of your 

 friend is clearly out of all bounds of reason. 



J. A. M., Pa. — Referring to the time it takes 

 a bee to fly half a mile, gather a load of hon- 

 ,ey and return, I would state that it varies 

 greatly. The flight of the bee going to the 

 fields is about 15 or 18 miles an hour ; and its 

 return, if heavily laden, from eight to twelve. 

 These rates will be varied a good deal accord- 

 ing to the wind, and according to whether the 

 bees are working on basswood or white clover. 

 If on the latter, they might take, and proba- 

 bly do take, 20 minutes to an hour to gather a 

 load and return to the hive. Experiments 

 have shown that bee-loads vary considerably. 

 Prof. Lazenby, of the Experiment Station at 

 Wooster, O., has found from experiments that 

 the average load of nectar carried by the bees 

 is .022 cf a gram, which is 27 per cent of the 

 average weight of a bee, or a little over one- 

 quarter of its own weight. If, on the other 

 hand, the bees were robbing a neighbor's hon- 

 ey-can, half a mile awaj^, they might go in 

 seven or eight minutes, assuming that the aver- 

 age flight was at the rate of about a mile in 

 five minutes. If the bees are gathering from 

 basswood or some other plant where there is a 

 large supply of nectar in a single blossom, the 

 time might be about half that for gathering a 

 similar amount from clover. Referring to 

 your question as to when bees gather water in 

 the spring, that takes place as soon as settled 

 warm weather comes, and when the bees are 

 at work on the pollen. The length of time 

 on these trips, if they went half a mile, might 

 aggregate anywhere from seven to ten min- 

 utes. These figures, except those from Prof. 

 Lazenby, are not taken from actual ob-erva- 

 tion, and timed visits, but are only approxi- 

 mate estimates based on bicycle-runs when I 

 have chased bees up the road. I have ridden 

 a wheel so much that I can form a pretty ac- 

 curate idea of my speed, and bees will very 

 often " take to the road " to avoid rising over 

 shrubbery and trees when the pasture and the 

 hives are in a bee-line with the road, as hap- 

 pens to be the case with our out-yard. 



